The very lovely article was written by Manila-based Tracey Paska, and the publication dedicated to local, organic, sustainable food is based in Minnesota.

I think that officially makes me an international foodie of mystery. I'm going to keep telling myself that, anyway.

P.S. This crop mob idea sounds fabulous. Any UK smallholdings out there interested in getting some help for planting or harvest season? Anyone want to contribute some time to a farm but can spare only a day rather than a couple of weeks? Get in touch here, let's see if we can get something organised!

07 October 2010

Want to get off to a flying start on your maiden WWOOFing gig? Read on... Photo by Amir Shamsuddin

So you've heard me yammering on about WWOOFing (volunteering on organic farms). Maybe you even read that Straits Times article I mentioned. And maybe you've even checked out WWOOF's website. Your curiosity is piqued. You're pumped. You're ready to pitch in, literally.

What's the best way to get started?

Here are my top 10 tips for getting your first WWOOF gig:

Decide what you want from your WWOOF stint. This will help you filter through a WWOOF country's database faster. Sample questions to ask yourself:

Are you especially interested in working with vegetables, fruit, grains or animals?

Do you want to learn how to make products for sale from the farm produce you work with? E.g., jams from fruit, noodles from wheat, sausages from sheep or pigs etc.

Are you interested only in farming, or would you rather be at a place that had related activities / businesses? E.g., a rural inn, spiritual centre, market stand, restaurant etc

Would you rather be on a farm where you're likely to be the only volunteer, have 1-3 more volunteers with you, or be part of a large rotating group of volunteers?

Do you have allergies and/or dietary restrictions? Do animals make you sneeze? Could you stand to potentially go vegan or vegetarian for a few weeks? Or give up your vegetarianism for a few weeks?

Can you picture yourself living in a tent for a few weeks, or do you need to sleep under a roof?

Identify what you can bring to the table. Create a reference list for yourself. List any planting or harvesting or building experience you may have. Don't despair if you're a city slicker and have tofu-soft hands. Farmers need all sorts of non-farm help as well. So if you have mad skillz in IT, business planning, marketing, contract drafting and reviewing, photography and copywriting (the list goes on) make sure you have that all in front of you as well.

Case in point: In my last job I spent a lot of time writing bullet-point documents (kinda like this one but more about esoteric business strategy) for clients. When WWOOFing in Japan this past April, I used this skill to assemble a 30-page farm instruction manual for future WWOOFers from notes written on a pile of scrap paper. When our host saw the final document, she nearly cried with joy (none of my clients in my previous life ever reacted like that, that's fer shure!). I got an email recently saying that my manual is still being well used by subsequent volunteers.

Pick a season. If you were born and bred in the city like me, it takes a while to adjust your brain to think about the year from the point of view of a farm. You're more likely to get a WWOOF stint you want in spring or autumn, because that's when farms are busiest and most need help. Spring means a lot of planting and animal birthing; autumn means a lot of harvesting. Summer can be a busy time as well if your WWOOF host grows fruit and berries, and especially if they dry or can those fruits. Summer is also a time for building projects given the relatively dry weather. Winters are usually quiet times on farms, though I've heard that on pig farms winter is the season for artisans to get together and make salami and prosciutto. (I need to get me one of those gigs)

If you have the luxury of picking the timing of your WWOOF expedition, think about what you'd most like to do or learn about, and position your WWOOF request for that season.

Decide how long you can / want to WWOOF for. WWOOF hosts usually mention in their listing the minimum and maximum duration they'll offer for any 1 volunteer. I personally recommend committing yourself to a 2 week stint for your first time around. One week is probably too short to really get into the rhythm of things. By the time your host trains you up it's time to go and they have to retrain someone else all over again. I personally don't think you want to commit yourself to a much longer period than 2 weeks from the get go, just in case you find out very quickly that you simply hate it.

Pick a location. Personally, I think it makes more economic sense to WWOOF somewhere where labour is expensive i.e., a developed country rather than a developing country. Babs and I felt a bit silly working the land inKenya, when there were a few locals hanging about the demonstration garden every day not doing much. Especially when the average wage of a Kenyan farm labourer is just over US$1 a day. That said, WWOOFing in a developing country and spending time with the locals is a fantastic way to really get under the skin of a place, for better or worse, far away from the glossed and penned up holiday resorts meant only for foreigners.

Create and organise your target list. Join your WWOOF country organisation of choice, dig into their database and create your long list of target farms. Check if the country organisation has a mailing list (e.g., Kenya) , or host review platform (e.g., Japan) for you to check if your target hosts come with recommendations by or warnings from previous WWOOFers. Use these reviews to help shorten your list.

Customise your email to each WWOOF host. WWOOF hosts are rightfully picky about who they take into their home, and popular farms get plenty of applications. A well written letter will help the host notice you above the other applicants. Your letter should contain the following components, preferably in the following order:

You are inquiring about the possibility for the farm to host x volunteers for x days, from x date to y date.

A short paragraph on who you are (e.g., backpacker / young couple on honeymoon etc), and why you are interested in WWOOFing at all.

A short paragraph on why you are interested in that host's farm in particular, and what projects / tasks you are particularly keen on getting involved with.

What immediately relevant skills you can contribute, if you can match it to their published list of tasks and projects

List any farming, gardening or building experience if any, even if they weren't WWOOFing experiences. After your first WWOOF gig, be sure to list your previous WWOOFing experiences.

What additional skills you offer (couch this with "if it turns out to be helpful". Stress that you are happy to help out with whatever is needed on the farm.)

Send out your emails well in advance. On average we sent out emails about 2 months before arriving in the country. The more lead time you set up for yourself, the better the odds are for your top target host having availability for you. WWOOF organisations say you should contact WWOOF hosts one at a time, and write to the next one only after you hear back from the previous one. I confess I don't follow this rule, because many hosts don't actually reply at all, for whatever reason. Instead, I rank my list by my level of interest in them. On Day 1 I'll send off emails to the top 3 or 4, then after 3 days (if I don't hear anything) I'll email the next 3 or 4, and so on. In exchange, I try my best to reply on the same day if I hear back from anyone. And once I commit to one host, I'll send a quick note to subsequent hosts that reply saying thank you, but I've already secured and committed to another WWOOF opportunity. This way they're not left hanging.

Procure appropriate insurance. You just scored your first WWOOF gig. Huzzah! Get yourself some travel insurance, and check that your travel insurance covers

The country you'll be WWOOFing in

Volunteer work

The tasks you will definitely be undertaking. E.g., there are usually separate insurance policy clauses regarding working with animals and heavy farm machinery, so if you know you will be undertaking this kind of work, make sure that you are covered for it. You may think you can't afford to, but you really don't want to find out the hard way that you actually couldnt afford not to.

Pack sensibly. Farming is sweaty, muddy work. Pack

Old t-shirts and trousers

Waterproof hiking boots and comfortable socks

A hat or cap to keep off the sun

Suncreen

Moquito spray

If you want, a pair of gardening gloves (it's worth checking with your host if you need to)

If you want to be really nice, a small gift from home for your host

All the best, enjoy, and tell us all about it when you get back!

Did you find this article helpful? What other crucial tips for first time WWOOFers would you add?

13 September 2010

Our WWOOFing (organic farm volunteering) adventures got picked up by this past Sunday's edition of The Straits Times, the English news daily of my native Singapore.

Fwah, in the HOT section no less. I'm sure they meant the oven. But I'll take what I can get!

Read the full story here. Thanks for scanning and pdf-ing and pinging it over here to Rio, Mum!

I'm hoping the article by Rachael Boon about WWOOFing will pique the curiosity of more city-born-and-bred types like me, to venture out of the concrete jungle we know and love so well and explore and engage the places where our food comes from.

Babs and I have now WWOOFed in Spain, Kenya and Japan while on the road, and personally I look forward to more WWOOFing as part of our lifestyle even after we're (soon) done with this big fat 15-month honeymoon.

04 June 2010

Above: This warrior ldoesn't look convinced that being now able to buy durian in his native Japan is necessarily a good thing

I've lost count of how many times our merry crew of travelers in Japan said among ourselves, "Just when you think you've figured out Japan, it throws you a curveball".

Sometimes even a durian.

Midway through our Japan WWOOFing stint near Osaka, Nana -- our farm host's 18-year-old daughter -- pipes up at dinner and asks me if I know what a durian is.

Well of course I do. Durians are from my native Southeast Asia, I told her. Olive green, roundish and thorny on the outside. Yellow, creamy and bittersweet on the inside. Unbearably stinky to the uninitiated, a heavenly aroma to the converted. In foreigner-friendly Singapore where I grew up, they're not allowed anywhere on the public transport system or in hotels because of their smell.

Why do you ask, Nana?

"I saw doo-ree-yaan at a shop near my school. I cycled past it many times. I can smell it but I don't know what it's like. I don't know how to eat it," she said.

I chuckled, wondering how on earth durians got past customs in a land where the palette is very much about subtle clean tastes.

"So you know how to eat it? You like doo-ree-yaan?" Nana ventured again.

I love it, I told her, but I can't promise the same for anyone in Japan.

We left it at that and I thought nothing more of it, besides trying to decide if the globalised food supply system had reached new heights of sophistication or just downright silliness.

Two days later -- a public holiday in Japan -- Nana shows up while we're prepping lunch, with durian in tow.

So durian for tea it was. Babs and I pried it open, handed sections around, and demonstrated how to nibble the creamy yellow pulp around the khaki-coloured seeds. I watched our hosts try to inhale as infrequently as possible.

And then I watched them eat durian with chopsticks.

The entire fun of being with someone when they have their first durian is watching their reactions. Shigemi, her mother and Nana, with vintage Japanese politeness, all said something to the tune of "it tastes better than it smells, but I've had enough now" -- Shigemi while offering us a third pot of tea to wash the taste out of our mouths (and her kitchen).

Yashinori -- Shigemi's 15-year-old son -- took a nibble, and then his eyes half popped out of his head. He made a loud retching sound, and then he bolted to the kitchen sink and stuck his head under the tap for a good 10 minutes.

Perhaps now was not the time to tell Yashinori that this durian was of the Thai variety -- less stinky, less bitter, and less runny than its Malaysian counterpart, and sometimes described with disdain by durian snobs as "might as well be eating sweet potato".

Later that evening, Shigemi let on that she had had a chat with Nana about the durian before Nana went and got it.

Said Shigemi to Nana: "So, you are willing to cycle all the way over the mountain and back, on a day when you don't have to go to school, and spend 1,600 yen from your supermarket part-time job pay, for something that smells funny, and that you know you might not like."

01 June 2010

When we went rooting around for bamboo shoots while WWOOFing in Japan, we came home with a disappointing harvest. The local wild boars had gotten to them first -- evident in the clusters of ruts we found in the ground.

But what goes around comes around. Our disappointment quickly faded when our WWOOF host Shigemi suggested that we try UdonKurusu on our day off. People from many towns around travel into Nose (pronounced Nose-say) to eat at Kurusu, she said. Especially those with a nose for wild boar, or shi-shi niku.

"The local hunters like going there especially in the winter months, for wild boar shabu shabu," she said.

Is there a more delicious way to pass a winter evening?

Turns out, the late spring lunch experience is not to be knocked either.

We had walked past Kurusu quite a few times during our week on the farm when we ran errands in town. From the far end of its parking lot I had always been confused about whether it was a restaurant or a taxidermist, given the slightly tired looking stuffed bear, deer and wild boar in the glass showcase at its entrance.

It all made sense when we realised that Kurusu specialied in game meats. In addition the more domestic, chicken, duck and pork, Nakamura Mitsugu -- who has owned and run Kurusu for more than 30 years -- also serves up wild boar, pheasant, deer, and yes, bear.

My wild boar udon came in a little lidded cauldron with beautifully fresh raw napa cabbage, leeks, bean sprouts, enoki mushrooms, soup stock, and a few gorgeous deep-red-and-white streaked sliced of wild boar, peeking out from under the lid.

Having it cook right in front of you is (a large) part of the fun.

Things start to get very hot and steamy.

This was the 2nd time in my life I've had wild boar. The first time was a wild boar ragu with pasta at Italian restaurant Oso in Singapore. As before, the wild boar tasted of pork but with much more personality -- no doubt from the hog spending its life running around at will outdoors, eating a wide variety of roots (e.g., bamboo!), flowers, fruits, acorns, mushrooms, worms etc. According to our WWOOF hosts in Spain, wild boars are crafty enough to root or wriggle their way through veg and flower bed wire fences. They're even apparently wily enough to shake the fruit of a tree, to the despair of many a farmer!

When farmers get fed up enough, they call in the local hunters, and a delicious quest begins. In Andalucia where we WWOOFed, the boar-sighter apparently gets the first choice of cuts if the hunt goes well.

Before I boar you to tears... For those who prefer rice to noodles, Kurusu also does a wild boar katsu set, with a little bowl of udon on the side. Not as fun as the cookalong-live udon, in my opinion, but no doubt just as delish.

If you're not the gun-toting type but would like to go on this little boar hunt to Kurusu as a day trip from Osaka...

Get on the Hankyu-Takarazuka train from Umeda station in Osaka (~25 minutes)

Change at Kawanishi-noseguchi station and get onto the Nose train line (~25 minutes)

Get off at Yamashita, the end of the line

Walk outside to the bus stop, and take bus 73 to Yamabeguchi (~25 minutes)

After you alight from the bus, take the first left at the intersection. Kurusu is about a 5-minute walk up the street, on your right

07 May 2010

Above: Toasting your mochi before you eat them produces a golden crispy surface and a lovely warm gooey centre. But watch out -- toast them too long and they could erupt!

You might be familiar with mochi. The Japanese chewy gooey rice cakes usually filled with a sweet red bean paste, and in more recent times popping up in many more fahionable flavours (e.g. coffee) and fillings (e.g. fruit-flavoured jellies or ice-cream). Traditionally they were eaten by farmers in the winter to mend both body and soul, and are a treat eaten during the Japanese New Year.

What I wasn't familiar with, however, was just how mochi work hand-made mochi takes!

As Babs, Chris and I learnt how to make this delicious traditional treat while WWOOFING on a rice farm near Osaka, we wondered "can anyone we know actually make this at home?"

Possibly. If we can't tempt you with the great mochi workout (great exercise for the biceps and triceps, as the guys will attest!) check your Asian grocery stores for mochi sheets or mochi powder. As for yomogi (Japanese mugwort), it's long been regarded a North-Asian cureall for blood purification and inflammation reduction, so dried versions of the leaves have known to be sold in Asian markets and medical halls, to be used as a soup or tea or even spa ingredient!

But if you want try to make mochi the old school way, here's how. The effort might just make you love your mochi that mochi more.

Collect a big plastic bag of young yomogi leaves. They grow wild in the Japanese and Korean countryside, in parks and even just next to roads. Foraging best done between March and May when the leaves are sufficiently sized, but still tender. Given we were on the farm in April, Shigemi sent us out to forage for the year's harvest. The surplus can be sun-dried or frozen.

Remove leaves with brown bits

Place yomogi in a large basin

Put a couple of scoops of charcoal ash in a towel bag, and place the bag on top of the yomogi

Pour boiling water on the ashbag until the basin is full of water. Leave a weight (e.g. a cooking pan filled with water) on the ash bag to keep the yomogi underwater

The above process removes the bitterness from the yomogi leaves

Drain the basin and squeeze the water out of the yomogi

Preparing the Azuki (Sweet Red Beans)

Wash and drain 300g of azuki

Bring the beans to a boil, boil for 5 minutes, then drain the water. This removes the bitterness from the beans

Refill the pot with water and bring the beans to a boil again, then lower the flame as much as possible and let the beans continue to simmer until their skins have cracked

Drain the beans

Mix 3 tablespoons of white sugar and 1 tablespoon of unrefined sugar into the beans

Shape the bean paste into little balls (about 2cm in diameter)

Making the Mochi

Steam the soaked sticky rice for about 20 minutes

Add a thick layer of yomogi on top of the rice and steam for about a couple of minutes

Transfer the steamed yomogi to a mortar and use a mochi hammer (or pestle) to pound the yomogi (use short sharp quick movements of the hammer)

Remove the yomogi from the mortar and set aside

Transfer the sticky rice to the mortar

Use a mochi hammer to pound the sticky rice into a smooth sticky dough (short sharp quick movements of the hammer)

Shigemi says she's never seen WWOOFERS make mochi with such...such... what's the word, Chris?

I osso say! A very respectable effort, when compared with these veterans.

Add the pounded yomogi into the rice dough, and pound with long strokes of the hammer (swing the hammer from directly overhead) to mix the yomogi into the dough. Pound as quickly a possible – the rice dough is malleable only when it's still warm

When the dough and yomogi is smoothly mixed, cut / pull out balls of dough (about 4 cm in diameter)

Wet both your hands, and flatten out the dough ball in your palm. Make the edges of the patty thinner than the middle

Place an azuki ball in the middle of the patty

Fold in the corners of the patty (and the resulting smaller corners

Turn the mochi upside down, wet your hand again, and use both your hands to make quick circular movements in opposite directions. Use your thumb to smooth out the shape of the mochi

(Pardon the light. We were all working at night in the backyard kitchen!)

Sprinkle rice powder on a tray

Roll the mochi on the rice powder and lay out in rows in the tray. This way they won't stick to each other

Serving the Mochi

Toast It! Place the stuffed mochi on a charcoal grill or in a toaster oven, and warm for a few minutes, until the mochi develops a light golden crust. Watch out! The mochi will expand, and if left alone the azuki will erupt from the mochi. Shigemi says this will produce a heavenly smell, but quite a sticky mess!

Soup It Up! Use some of the dough to roll into plain mochi balls to eat with boiled sweetened azuki soup (right). To make the soup, add boiling water to the cooked azuki and sweeten to taste. Shigemi's mother enjoyed this so much she had 3 mochi balls in her soup for dinner, while the boys and I could only manage 1 each!

Old school mochi, made this way without preservatives, keeps for only 2 to 3 days at most. So if you've made more than you can eat, be sure to spread the love around.

05 May 2010

While WWOOFING on a rice farm near Osaka, Japan, our host Shigemi taught us how to make Amazake, a sweet fermented rice drink which was apparently used as a remedy for summer fatigue as early as in the Edo period. The boost provided by the drink has been compared to an IV drip. And, because the sweetness of the drink is entirely from the fermentation process itself rather than due to any added sweeteners, it can be used as a sugar substitute. (See Grainnaisance and Bittersweetblog for a few recipes using Amazake as a sweetener)

How to Make Koji Rice

At the heart of Amazake is koji -- the essence of Japanese food at large because it is the same rice-based fermenting agent used to make sake, soy sauce, and miso.

Making your own koji rice is a highly involved 2-day process. For the committed, check if your local Japanese specialty store sells koji spores (picture of a packet on the right) or else order them online at GEM Cultures. Then follow these step-by-step instructions on how to make your own koji rice on Everything 2. Alternatively, Vision Brewing sells koji-seeded rice and instructions how to use it to "koji-fy" a larger batch of rice for use.

How to Make Amazake

Use 2 portions of Japanese short-grain rice for every 1 portion of koji. Also, have a thermometer handy.

Use 5-7 cups of water for every cup of regular rice

Cook the regular rice until it becomes porridge (40-60 minutes)

Cool the porridge until it reaches between 50 deg C and 60 deg C

Mix koji into the porridge thoroughly

Keep the mixture between 50 deg C and 60 deg C for 10 hours (If using a rice cooker, use the “keep warm” function, and keep the rice cooker lid open if the mixture needs cooling)

NOTE: If mixture spend an extended period at more than 60 deg C, it won't become sweet. If below 50 deg C, the mixture becomes sour

During the 10 hours, stir the mixture thoroughly every 2-3 hours. Wash mixing spoon with boiling hot water before stirring the mixture. This kills off any germs

After 10 hours, the mixture is sweet

To Serve Amazake as a hot drink...

Mix a 1 portion of water for every 1 portion of fermented ice mixture

Bring the mixture to a boil, and let boil for 5 minutes

Add a pinch of salt and grated fresh ginger to the mixture to taste

Refrigerate the boiled mixture above to serve as a refreshing cold drink, or freeze it to serve as a sherbet-like dessert!

02 May 2010

We just completed an exhilarating week WWOOFing on a family-run rice farm about 90 minutes outside of Osaka, Japan, in a town called Nose (pronounced No-say). (Find out more about WWOOFing in general and WWOOFing in Japan in particular.)

Babs's old friend from school, Chris, joined us for the week. What a great debut WWOOFING gig!

It's spring spring spring, smack in time for the busy rice-planting season. There's plenty-and-a-half to keep us all out of mischief.

I help our host Shigemi to sow the year's crop. Shigemi grows about 450kg of rice a year, sells two thirds of it to a network of direct customers, and feeds her family with the rest.

The rice seedlings are nursed very carefully -- after a stint in an incubator, the seedlings bask on the front lawn of the house, periodically covered with tarp to keep out the chilly spring wind and rain. Their growth progress is closely monitored to determine when they are ready for transplanting in the fields.

Rural Japan, if not the whole country, still assigns many roles by gender. So while everyone pitches in for weeding all around the farm, the boys get assigned a lot more outdoor work while I compile a comprehensive (digital) farm instruction manual for Shigemi's future WWOOFers.

Babs and Chris help to prepare the rice fields for flooding and planting -- clearing weeds and stones, leveling the ground, and unchoking the water channel. Here's a before-and-after shot. Great work guys!

They also spend the week assembling a giant weed raker, which -- once the seedlings are snugly in the ground -- will be pulled through the fields once every three days to up-end new weeds. Shigemi's very excited about this rake because her farm is transiting towards being fully organic. She's steadily reduced her use of weedkiller over the last few years, and she says with this rake, she'll be able to stop using weedkiller completely this year. Huzzah!

We also learn a great deal about foraging and living off the land. Besides garnishing soups and making salad with wild herbs growing around the farm, tis the season for bamboo shoots, and we get a hands-on lesson on spotting and unearthing them. Unfortunately, wild boars in the area have beaten us to quite a number of the delicious shoots, but we still manage a sackful, including Chris's whopper!

Last but certainly not least, we learn 2 traditional rice product recipes whose hand-made-from-scratch renditions have largely disappeared from modern industrial Japan -- Amazake, a fermented rice drink, and a very muscle-intensive Yomogi mochi.

30 January 2010

In short, I found our WWOOFing stint in Kenya to be utterly confounding. Three months on from our October (2009) stint, I find myself with many more questions than pithy quips or verdicts. I hope these anecdotes provide some colour as to why. I didn't have any grand ambition to get under Kenya's skin during our mere 6 weeks in the country, but I suspect Kenya's gotten under mine.

"Hallo Mzungu! How Are you? Give Me Money!"

"Mzungu" is Swahili for ATM.

Well.

Actually it means white man, or more broadly, foreigner. Many people we met in Kenya associate foreigners (especially whites) with money. Including our WWOOF host. Who asked us to contribute US$5 a day for food and lodging. Not a large sum. But because it was sprung on us only after we arrived -- despite multiple emails exchanged beforehand -- and because it goes against WWOOF's no-cash-exchange principle, it set our stint off to a sour start.

We agreed, giving him the benefit of doubt that finances on Rusinga Island were tough. But we made our view clear, that as WWOOFers we were here to offer our labour and ideas in exchange for food and lodging.

Midweek rolled along, and our host asked us to pay up for the week. We told him we were planning to go to the ATM (half hour away by motorcycle taxi) on the weekend. If we went today, it'd eat up most of our afternoon farming shift at Badilisha.

"Skip your shift today," our host said.

Evidently his view was now clear as well.

Later on we found out we got off relatively easy. Daniel and Cyrill, our co-volunteers from USA and Germany respectively, got various appeals to finance the schooling of 2 of our host's grandchildren. And a list of grocery and sundry items anytime either of them went into town.

Just before we left, our host asked if we would donate a month's worth of sorghum flour for his kindergarthen. Babs and I debated the proposition. I'd grown attached to some of the kids during our stint. But something clicked and soured further when Babs pointed out, "The guy owns his house, the guesthouse we live in, and all the land around us. None of us volunteers own a house. And he rents a separate house in Homa Bay (the nearest town 20km away). And he's making US$5 a day from each volunteer when it must cost less than US$2 a day to feed us, cos that's what the average daily wage is around here."

We heard the same requests for money from quite a few people we met while just walking to and from Badilisha or the local trading post. The schtick was pretty standard. "Mzungu! Eh Mzuuuunguuuu! How are you? Can you give me some money?"

Street kids at bus stations aside, many of these kids obviously had a home and a school to go to. That's what I infer, given they were hollering to us from their front door stoop, wearing school uniforms.

What in their upbringing has signalled that asking for money from strangers as a salutation is acceptable behaviour? Am I just being skint?

"In Kenya We Just Wait"

One evening we were all gathered in our host's living / dining room, and I asked casually "what's for dinner?" Our host replied "In Kenya the men never go into the kitchen and ask and find out. In Kenya we just wait."

There's a lot of waiting that goes on around here. For the elusive rains to come, to start planting. For foreign donations to kickstart community help programmes. For the arrival of foreign volunteers to staff them. And, so says the crackly radio news every morning, for The Hague to swoop in and "take away in an aeroplane" the perpertrators of bloody violence during the 2007 elections.

I've never been good at waiting for anything. But especially not for rain, when the island resides in Lake Victoria, the 3rd largest freshwater lake in the world. What else might be good to go, right there, right then, if only one would stop waiting?

Moving Stationery

Our co-volunteer Daniel had bought 2 packs of pencils as a gift for the kindergarthen kids. He walked up the hill with our host and us one morning to gift them. Our host gave one of the packets to my class's teacher, and told Daniel he'd hang on to the other packet.

"But I'd like to give all of the kids a pencil each," said Dan.

Our host said it was better for the teacher to hang on to the pencils because the kids would lose them. Daniel stood his ground, asking why not just give the other packet to the other teacher then.

This went back and forth, and admittedly was getting increasingly awkward. Class was starting so Babs and I went to our separate classrooms.

Later, at recess, Babs told me that our host finally came into his classroom with the 2nd pack of pencils. Then went out and ended his conversation with Daniel, who then went off to Badilisha to start his morning shift.

Said Babs: "Then he (our host) came back in, grabbed the pack of pencils off the teacher's table, and walked out."

It made me wonder, "Does he really think word won't get back to Daniel? And if he doesn't, why not?"

I turned the question on myself: To what extent do my donations to anything go to where I think they're going? How much effort do I put into finding out what portion of my donation goes to the agency's staff salaries vs the cause's receipients? What kind of seeds do programmes hailing "move towards self-sufficiency" actually give farmers? To what extent are they patented one-generation-only seeds, so that the farmers are always reliant on the aid agency for the next season's crops? Where is the longer-term incentive for subsistence farmers to grow any surplus crops to take to market, if they are constantly up against heavily subsidised food aid?

Or do I consider my work done once I get that warm fuzzy feeling after handing some money over to a philantrophic cause?

"I'm Positive"

I left Kenya pretty much ranting and raving, but I find myself unable to write Kenya off, and nowhere near giving up on WWOOFing (we hope to do some WWOOFing in Japan, New Zealand and somewhere in South America in the months ahead).

Because for every mzungu leech I remember, I can't forget those that are doing the best they can.

Like my class's heavily pregnant teacher, walking the half hour every day to and from school even though she was due to deliver the week after we left.

Like the women who sell little piles of tomatoes and onions and little blocks of cooking fat and stalks of sugarcane, from a piece of canvas on the side of the road, with their babies strapped to their hips.

Like 6-year-old Michael Jr, on loan from his parents who live in aother town, since his grandfather (our host) fell quite ill a year ago. Michael Jr's after-school chores include bringing the empty porridge bucket from school back to the house, running to and from the local trading post, setting and clearing the dinner table, helping to drive the donkeys to and from the lake to get water, to the point where he's always falling asleep in his dinner plate.

Like Esther, a woman we met one day on a village road. She stopped to say hello, and introduce herself, and thank us for visiting and volunteering on the island. And shared a little of her life story. That her husband had died of AIDS. But she and her son do as best they can. "I'm positive, and my son is positive."

With nary a request for money.

Recounting this episode to our friend Louise in Dubai about a month later, I said, "Quite sunny and scrappy wasn't she? Her husband's dead but she's stilll positive."

27 January 2010

While our Kenyan WWOOF host Michael Odula had plenty of land around his home (and more in other parts of Rusinga Island, some told us), there was no farming activity to be seen on any of it. We were told that the crops from the previous year (2008) failed, and he had not done any planting this season (Oct 2009) because the rains had not come.

So in the afternoons we were sent a 20-minute walk downhill to help out at Badilisha, a community centre with a garden run by Mr Odula's son Evance.

Badilisha offers HIV counseling and non-violent communication workshops to members of the community. It also houses a couple of sewing machines as part of a programme to help women to make and sell crafts (though I think I saw only 1 or 2 women using the machines during our 2 weeks there), and a small library of book related to farming methods, international aid, and spirituality. There are also ambitions to host an orphans feeding programme, but this currently remains unfunded.

Badalisha's garden hosts an array of banana, papaya, and passionfruit trees. Out here is where we spent most of our time.

Our main standalone project here was to build a chicken coop to house a couple of donated chickens. The idea was to build a structure that could harvest the chicken droppings so that it could be used for fertiliser. The easiest way to do this was to build a portable coop with a wire mesh floor.

The twist in the plot was that to build this coop we had to deconstruct and recycle a disused rabbit hutch (previously used to house a few donated rabbits... hmm). And we had to use mostly recycled nails, a hammer donated by fellow WWOOFer Dan, and a borrowed saw. All in all, more people than tools. So I often wandered off to get a start on digging and watering.

We also built birdbaths from recycled mineral water bottles to hang in passionfruit trees. The hope was to attract birds so that they would eat the bugs that would otherwise eat the passionfruit. On the right is a passionfruit flower, which I had never seen before.

Digging and watering 5 days a week for 2 weeks may sound mundane, but it's not. You never know what's going to pop up out of the ground. Sometimes it's a pretty seedling. Sometimes it's a baby python. Eek! I'm trying to remember if this is how we finally managed to convince Dan to stop farming in flipflops...

After our shift is done we usually troop over to the local trading post for some warm soda. Which I am not a fan of. It always makes me burp very painfully through my nose. So instead I gnaw on a snack lovingly remembered from my youth -- raw sugarcane, at 1 Kenyan shilling per segment (see size below).

24 January 2010

Above: I've been told I'm the first Singaporean to show up on Rusinga Island.

During our 2-week stint WWOOFing in Kenya, we spent our mornings being teaching assistants at Millimani Academy. It's a grand name for what is a 2-classroom structure with a concrete floor, wooden beams, aluminum walls and roof, and chicken wire windows, built on our host Michael Odula's land, further up the hill from his family home. Many kindergarthens in Kenya are community-run and funded, as state funding for education starts only at the primary school level.

Millimani houses 30-40 children (depending on absentee rates) from the neighbourhood, aged between 2 and 7. Some of the kids are orphans -- raised by their grandparents because their parents (who would have been around my age) have died of AIDS. Some orphans have parents -- raised by their grandparents because their young (sometimes single) parents have gone to the cities in search of work.

School starts at 9am, usually a combination of English and Math. English usually involves learning the alphabet, and learning context-specific words (e.g. a lesson on weather involved learning words such as "sunny", "rainy" and etc). Math at this stage is about counting, and addition and subtraction. There's more class participation and leadership than what I remember from my kindergarthen years.

Above: Vivian leads the count; the class choruses. I am where I have always sat all my life in class -- at the back with the tall kids and sometimes troublemakers

Our tasks for the stint weren't set out in any particularly organised fashion. Well. Not at all, really. The kids spoke mostly Luo -- their tribal language -- and were just starting to learn basic English and Swahili. So any kind of involved spoken communication was out. Mostly Babs and I tried not to be too much of a distraction during class, and nudged the kids along during "homework" sessions -- making sure they were following instructions and trying to coach the slower kids.

One terrifying morning my class teacher was absent, so after the other teacher held a combined teaching session, I was left alone to oversee and mark the homework session. And enforce class discipline. I've grown up with teacher stories all my life, but I remain completely mystified at how my mother, Babs's mother and all our teacher-friends manage to do this.

Babs took on the younger class of 2-to-4-year olds. Only the older half of his class had desk space. The "babies" sat on the floor, learning mostly, I imagine, by osmosis. Outside of helping his older kids with homework, Babs's main focus was trying not to tread on the babies with his giant boots.

Recess runs from 10.30am to 11.30am. The kids have a huge amount of open space in front of the school building to run around in. Some of them are constanly climbing nearby trees to pluck and snack on a particular yellow pod. One of them gave me one to try, which I did, much to Babs's horror. It was unpleasantly tart, but hey, it didn't kill me.

When I was in school I played a game called "five-stones" -- kinda like jacks. The "stones" were little stitched bags filled with beans or rice. Here, many of the girls compete intensely on a local version of the game played with real stones. It took me days of watching closely, but by the end of the stint I could follow the game and call them out when they were cheating.

Sometimes the kids decided they haven't had enough class for real, and play out a pretend class. I think Vivian has teaching potential.

Sometimes they just wanna dance.

Sometimes they gather round and do some combination of cuddling up and/or poking at me out of curiosity. This was especially true when I broke out in hives due to a reaction to over-zealous use of insect spray. Averse to any kind of fuss, I got them to count along to how many spots and swells they could find on my arms. They learned some new numbers that day.

At the end of recess each kid is given a large plastic mug of sorghum porridge (made by Mama Odula in the morning and carried in a large bucket up the hill by one of the teachers or Babs). For many of the kids this is their first meal of the day, which means there is ALWAYS vicious pushing and shoving in the queue even though there is always enough to go around. Babs and I act as line bouncers -- spacing out the squished, picking up the pushed down, and pulling into line the dopey drifters. Then the teacher leads them in saying grace, the stuff is doled out from the bucket, and then there is about 15 delicious minutes of complete silence.

Finally there's a last half-hour of singing and dancing to a mix of English and Swahili folk songs. Still not convinced Babs and I add much value here. Possibly just ridiculous entertainment by singing and dancing along -- always a great cause of giggling among the kids.

It's noon. Time to go home. I'm pooped. To all the teachers out there, Respect.

23 January 2010

One of the things Babs and I are trying to learn about on this sabbatical, is how our food is grown and more particularly, what methods are used by organic farmers, in defiance of industrial agriculture norms such as monoculture and usage of chemical fertilisers and pesticides.

Through WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms) -- a global network of organic farms that offer volunteers food and accomodation in exchange for a mutually agreed number of working hours on the farm -- we found a plethora of opportunities to get field lessons, literally.

Encouraged by our stint in Spain, we decided to WWOOF for 2 weeks in Kenya last October. This time, we found ourselves on Rusinga Island in Western Kenya, a small community on the shores of Lake Victoria.

To get there, you can either take a 12 hour bus from Nairobi to Homa Bay, then take a shared taxi to Mbita. Or, take a very pleasant overnight train from Nairobi to Kisumu, then take a 2 1/2 hour matatu (minivan bus) to Cortino Luanda ferry stage, then take a 1 hour ferry to Mbita. Then from Mbita, take a motorcycle taxi to Rusinga Island.

Yes there are more complicated commutes than London's Circle Line on a weekend.

Our hosts on Rusinga Island were the Odula family. Michael Odula is a retired local high school principal, and his wife Jane is a retired social worker.

We, along with 2 other volunteers from the USA and Germany, were housed in the Odula's guest house (the white house with green trimmings) situated next to the family home (in red). Each of the 3 bedrooms in the guesthouse have a bed and mosquito net.

Above: Tanya and Michael Jr, 2 Odula grandchildren, in front of the guesthouse

The Odulas have a small solar panel, just enough to keep a few light bulbs going at night and power up their mobile phones. There is no running water or plumbing onsite. Below is the outhouse, which has a concrete slab with a hole punched through that you squat over. Mind the cows on your way to the bathroom, and remember to pack toilet paper.

For that matter, mind the chicken if you're lounging in the guest house living room. We had a laying hen who really liked an old armchair in the corner. She'd lay 1 egg every day and wouldn't mind too much if you were in the room, as long as you were quiet. We had about 16 eggs by the time we left.

We'd eat with the Odulas in their living cum dining room, usually with the local radio news going in the background. On the right, a view of Lake Victoria from Odula's front door.

Mama Odula's wood-fired kitchen is a small hut behind the main house. She gets a hell of a lot of cooking done with just one hob and one long log. If she needs a low flame she pulls out the log, and if she needs a high flame she nudges it further in and blows air through a long metal pipe aerate the flame.

Here, she's making breakfast mandazi, dense sweet-salty deep-fried dough bricks. Very addictive with chai masala. On special days Mama Odula makes animal-shaped mandazi. I think the one below is an elephant. Or maybe a camel.

Since there's no running water in the neighbourhood, rainwater is collected in a large storage tank next to the house, then decanted, filtered and treated for drinking. If there is insufficient rain (which was the case this season), children and donkeys go down to the freshwater lake to collect water in jerry cans.

Kaswanga Beach was our neighbourhood beach, but we weren't allowed to go swimming there. For one thing, the lake hosts snails which have been known to carry the bilharzi virus. And then there are the man-eating hippos.

25 October 2009

First things first. This is not going to be a pretty blog post. As a meat eater I decided it was important for me to experience something like this at some point, to see if I could face the reality of the process of getting meat to my plate. Vegetarians and animal lovers, proceed with caution.

Thanks to Julia Parsons (A Slice of Cherry Pie) and James Brewer (Back to the Chopping Board) for coordinating this food blogging event to honour the late Keith Floyd. I was heartbroken when the original deadline passed and I had not yet gotten access to electricity and internet to post this while WWOOFing on Rusinga Island in West Kenya, but was delighted to see the deadline extension. Huzzah!

This post is dedicated to my Dad, with whom I used to watch Keith Floyd's culinary adventures around the world. We'd always have a good chuckle at his "wing it and swig it" approach to cooking and life. I'd like to think that Dad watches me undertake my many a hare-brained adventure with a similar bemusement.

Finally, this goat feast was very much a team effort. Thanks to Michael Odula for helping us source the goat, Samuel Odula for showing Babs how to kill it with minimal suffering, our fellow volunteers Dan and Cyrill for first raising the idea, co-financing this whopping 1,500 Kenyan shilling (~£13) enterprise, and being amazing comrades-in-arms throughout our stint. Finally thanks to the kids -- Michael Jr, Tanya, Gloria et al for being fabulous team players on the day.

So. Our fellow WWOOFer Dan walks into our living room on Rusinga Island in West Kenya one day and says "Hey I heard these WWOOFers back in July bought a whole goat and BBQed it. Are you interested in us pitching in to get one too?"

I say "YES", probably about as fast as I said yes when Babs proposed. Just possibly a wee bit faster.

And then Babs ups the ante (as he does): "Yes, but only if we buy a live goat and I get to kill the goat myself."

The week leading up to feast day was surprisingly unhyped. We simply agreed on a budget for a medium-sized goat and our homestay host Michael Odula spent a morning and an afternoon asking around if anyone in the neighbourhood had a goat from their flock for sale. He appointed his youngest son Samuel to help us through the kill.

D-Day. Our goat had arrives before breakfast. We went out to find it chilling out and snacking on a bush. Samuel reckons it weighs about 50kg. I get Babs to pose next to it for perspective.

Samuel takes the goat out to a stone plateau behind the Odula house and trusses it up. Under his guidance, Babs cuts deep into the goat's throat with Dan's camping knife. The key thing here is to cut right through the jugular. It's a steady hand and a sharp blade, and the goat stops moving in less than 3 minutes. There's less of a blood spurt than we expected.

Being behind the camera provides a strange sense of detachment but it's still a fairly intense experience watching my first food-animal kill. I wasn't sure if I would feel nauseous (I didn't) or feel huge pangs of guilt (I didn't either, given the goat had lived outdoors all its life, had a quick death, and we were damn well going to eat it nose to tail.)

It could have been scarier. Had we been with a more traditional tribe, they would have cut a pouch of skin under the goat's neck to catch the blood, then drink it as part of the ritual. I'm not ready to go that native.

A moment of solemn silence, and then Babs unties the goat in preparation for the next task...

...Skinning it. This requires some help from Michael Jr (back) and a neighbour (front) to hold up the legs while gentle but firm slits are made down the middle of the belly and down each leg.

Next, the shoulders are removed at the joints -- surprisingly easily, says Babs.

And now to remove the belly flap. This is to be done with great care so as not to puncture the stomach and contaminate the meat with half-digested stomach contents.

Samuel removes the guts into one neat pile.

Samuel and Babs section the ribs and joint the legs.

A neighbourhood dog gets a treat of spleen, lungs and kidneys. Later I remove the hooves and he comes back for those. He proceeds to follow me around for the rest of the day...hoping.

Samuel and Babs do the initial round of cleaning out half-digested greens from the small intestines. There's a lot of it. The smell, while not knock-you-out overpowering, is distinct and sticks in your head. Now I can always smell a goat (or their poop) that's anywhere in a 10m radius.

And now to empty out and scrape clean(ish) the stomach....all 4 of them.

Samuel and Babs wash and scrape fat from the goatskin, then nail it as high as they can on a nearby tree in the hope that the dogs won't get to it overnight. Idiotically we forgot this when we left -- we've asked Cyrill to wear it home to Frankfurt as a cape or something. Very Heart of Darkness, no?

Mama Odula panfries the liver for lunch on her charcoal cooker. She also stews whatever goat meat bits that won't be used for the nyama choma (Kenyan-style BBQ) dinner. The stomach and guts need a long hard soak and scrub before they'll be ready for cooking.

After lunch I get down to marinading the legs and ribs. Am keeping it simple as Floyd would have done. Wash the meat thoroughly. Place in basin. Pour Coca Cola into basin to tenderise the meat. Swig the rest of the bottle. This cooking with Coke business amuses the kids to no end. Floyd might have used local Tusker beer instead, but there was none available at our neighbourhood trading post.

Anyway, back to it. Divide 4-6 large garlic cloves into thick slices, make deep incisions in the legs, and stuff the garlic into the slits. Rub a generous amount of Roycomchuzi mix, the ubiquitous food seasoning found in these parts... Royco is a Unilever powdered concoction of constarch, salt, sugar, coriander cinnamon, fennel seeds, tumeric, ginger, garlic, cumin, methee seeds, flavour enhancers -- must be MSG I reckon -- and permitted food colouring, whatever that is.

I rope in Tanya to wave away the flies while the meat soaks.

Dan and Babs dig a hole for the fire in our "front yard" and pile up twigs and branches by size. We use dried corn cobs and corn hairs for firestarters. Not that I've ever had one, but I absolutely cannot ever go back to gas BBQ grills after this.

Waiting impatiently for the fire to reach optimum heat...

And away we go! 30 minutes of grilling, turning and basting...

And then, perfection.

Samuel was quite keen about grilling the goat's testicles...unfortunately due to the coarseness of the grill mesh Samuel accidentally dropped both into the flames while cooking them. He was quite despondent.

In the Odula living-cum-dining room, Babs carves up the legs, and Mama Odula brings in the matumbo: chopped up stomach and braided intestines stewed for hours in cooking fat, tomatoes and onions (and Royco I'm sure, judging by the colour). I try a little for my honour's sake, but it holds too strong a taste and smell of grass-half-digested-in-stomach-juices for me. Babs digs it though, having grown up with innards curry.

Gloria's had enough talk! It's time to chow down. Strictly traditional nyama choma doesn't use any wussy stuff like marinade, so our garlic adds a fabulously novel infusion to the meat.

The ribs -- between the Royco and the slow fire -- are deliciously smoky. The bits between the ribs could definitely work as a jerky snack.

Mama Odula is well impressed at how tender we've kept the meat. Mr Odula asks Babs if he's ever worked in a restaurant or a hotel.

We nearly choke on our goat laughing, but we're pleased at the compliment.

More importantly, we hope we've done the goat -- and Floyd -- justice today. A toast (of Coke) to both.

19 October 2009

We flew to Nairobi on the 1st of October from Cairo, and stayed a couple of nights in a banda at Upper Hill Campsite in a suburb of Nairobi (ironically not Upper Hill, since they moved from there).

[banda pic to come when I can get power for my camera!]

While there, we signed up for a 4 day safari with Big Time Safaris which would take us to the Masai Mara National Reserve and Lake Nakuru National Park. The safari wasn't cheap, but we bargained it down to $100 per day (still well over our budget!) which is not too bad since the Kenya Wildlife Service charges foreigners $60 a day to visit its top rated parks and the safari includes food, transport and accommodation.

We saw an incredible number of animals at both parks.

At the Masai Mara we saw: cheetahs, antelopes, Jackson gazelles, lions, elephants, giraffes, zebra, wildebeest, hippos, crocodiles, gnus, warthogs, eagles, hyenas, jackals, maribu storks and no doubt about 100 other species that I didn't identify or have forgotten already.

Lions

Buffalo

Wabs standing either side of the Kenya-Tanzania border in the Masai MAra

Lake Nakuru was full of flamingos - it's a soda lake which a large (2 million) population of flamingos migrates to every year. We also saw white rhinos and baboons, in addition to some species which we'd already seen at the Masai Mara.

We had our safari drop us off at Nakuru town, where we stayed a couple of days, before going to Kisumu (3rd largest town in Kenya) for two nights, then getting the bus and ferry to Rusinga Island where we started our two week volunteering stint just over a week ago. We're teaching assistants at a nursery school in the mornings and working at a permaculture demonstration project in the afternoon, which is all fun, if easy work, and we're experiencing genuine rural developing country life - ie, no electricity or running water, which is trying our paitence somewhat! Only 5 days to go though!

17 July 2009

So the thing is, our WWOOF hosts at the finca in Spain are vegetarians.

I walked into this eyes wide open. I figured between the veggie diet and doing manual work in the sun for 5 hours a day, it would be my healthiest phase since...ever. I was also curious to see how much I would (or maybe wouldn't, who knows) miss meat.

And it was all good, for any 3-4 days running. Veggie home-cooking was varied, hearty and tasty. But then, on day 5, the inevitable gnawing, rumbling, acid-juices-in-my-mouth-seeping craving for a chunk of meat would descend like a slow madness. I would glance askance at our hosts' dogs Zumbar and Oliva with their scavenged goat bones from the nearby gypsy compound. While the finca chickens hatched eggs, Babs and I hatched embarrasingly evil plots (e.g. what would a wolf-chewed hole in the henhouse need to look like?).

So on our days off, we'd scuttle across the dry river bed and 20 minutes uphill into Orgiva town and beyond, on the hunt for meat. This being Spain, the locals were only too happy to oblige. Here are a few of the high points from our clandestine meatings if you're visiting.

Bar El Tinao, Capileira

Midway through our stint, we spent a weekend away in Capileira, an hour by bus up the Sierra Nevada from Orgiva. I had a good feeling about Bar El Tinao when I saw our hostel manager from Hostal Rural Atalaya walk in with his family for dinner.

Around here, in the old Spanish custom, tapas come free when you order a drink. We got served pork skewers, hot off the grill, marinated with (I think) salt, pepper, paprika and a flash of tumeric. I bit down on one, uttered a slightly embarrassing sound of pleasure, then put my head down on the bar counter to chew.

El Asador, Capileira

After walking a couple of rounds around Capileira (and walking away from any restaurant with a sizeable vegetarian section on their menu) we followed the smell of mea on hot charcoal to El Asador, which listed roasted kid (baby goat) as a house speciality. I'd had curried goat before, but never kid. It tastes uncannily like turkey. If it wasn't for the different bone structure I would have sworn they did a bait and switch.

We also tried the Plato Alpujarran, also known in these parts as "poor man's breakfast". It had spicy chorizo and morcillo (black pudding sausage), 2 eggs, and potatoes fried with onions, peppers and jamon. What on earth do the rich people eat for breakfast?

As an aside, the mountain Spaniards are evidently big fans of morcillo. While sipping expresso and watching the F1 back at Bar El Tinao the next day, I watched a family of 6 order a whole platter of the stuff as part of brunch. I thought 12 links for 6 people was pretty serious. Then the table of 4 next to them ordered the same.

Bar El Tilo, Capileira

A lot of chorizo and jamon is cured up here in the mountains (there are apparently a myriad of pig slaughtering festivals in mountain villages each January, which I will have to weasel my way into at some point in my life). So a sampling platter of the region's pride had to be done. We got this €10 platter below at Bar El Tilo.

Above: Yes, the stuff in the middle is pure fat, which I've heard some locals refer to as "white meat". (Gotta love the Spanish). The mid-July afternoon sun was so hot that the fat started rendering right there on the wooden board.

Pollos Manolo Fernandez, Orgiva

These are the only Manolos I would ever spend any time lining up for.

On Thursdays, when the entire town square in Orgiva becomes a makeshift market, Mr Manolo Fernendez -- with his magnificent smile and even more magnificent 'tache -- pulls up with his even more maginificent rotisserie truck. The wall of chickens going round and round and round is absolutely mesmerising, especially when he flicks ladles of drippings at the grill to get a WOOSH of flame. The smell that wafts down the street is maddening.

Somehow, the cluster (there is no actual line) squished around his little kiosk and spilling into the road managed to keep their civility, even while dodging passing cars. Everyone's honest about their place in the queue, and while waiting I saw a man give his place to a woman with kids and bags of shopping, and she in turn gave her place to an old biddy lady. Another woman in the line even gave the neighbourhood drunk €2 so that he could afford a full €8 box.

At closing time, when the crowd has been sated, a woman poked her head out from the apartment across the street, sauntered across, and picked up a few of his last chickens without any wait. Babs asks me if we should buy that apartment. I tell him not to tease.

Casa Robles, Orgiva

When we asked for a recommendation for a traditional Spanish restaurant in Orgiva, Anthony pointed us to Casa Robles, though he couldn't vouch for the meat. No fear, however. The house special leg of lamb was superb, its savouriness well-mixed with a honey coating. And I figure I can trust an eatery that proactively apologises for the smallness of their (normal looking) spring chicken.

Even though we were there for meat, credit must be given to Casa Robles's use of strawberries -- organic and straight from the garden of owner Mr Jesus Mesa Torres. We tried a very refreshing strawberry gazpacho with crumbled mountain jamon, and couldn't say no to Mr Torres's strawberry flambe recommendation for dessert. Just as well; the full-on performance by Mr Torres himself provided entertainment with dinner.

Above, right: "You must be careful when you flambe...I used to have hair!" quips Casa Robles's Mr Torres while preparing dessert.

When all is said and done (and eaten), perhaps there's something to this part-time vegetarianism thing. It can't hurt your health, and it's less taxing on the environment. It's how people of old use to eat, after all, living mostly on roots and leaves and fruits in between big but infrequent hunts.

But perhaps most persuasive of all is the sky-high spike in pleasure when hunkering down after a period of not meating up. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, eh.

14 July 2009

It was a labour of love, involving blood (mud-&-straw clumps scratching up our hands), sweat (building under the Spanish summer sun) and tears (when a supporting structure collapsed for the 3rd time).

An outdoor oven is one of those things Babs and I nurse ambitions about having someday, in that yet-to-be-identified place where we will eventually settle down (along with a massive charcoal BBQ pit and motorised roast spit). So I jumped at the opportunity to learn how to build one... by actually building one, while WWOOFING at Anthony and Catherine's finca in Orgiva, Spain.

Our reference guide for the project was Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer. One of Denzer's main principles is to use recycled and/or foraged materials, so that cost of building will tax neither your pocket, nor the envioronment. The only materials Anthony bought were ~30 firebricks (a few spare) and a few pieces of slate. The rest of it was sand from the beach in Motril, clay fand rocks from nearby riverbeds, and dirt and straw from the farm.

The Base

Anthony had already completed the base when we arrived. It's a ringed stone wall, filled in with rubble. Right at the top it has insulating layers of clay and sand. The stone wall is self-supporting, but the crevices have been plastered up tight with mud and clay to prevent wasps from building nests in the gaps (The stone wall must have looked like a luxe condo block for waspy property hunters). On top of the slate are the firebricks (built denser than regular bricks to retain heat). This is the cooking floor of the oven.

The Support Dome

Question: If you're building a dome which has a base radius of 33cm and a height of 48cm, how many buckets of sand from Motril do you need? Answer: Many more than you think.

In any case, the shortage was a great excuse to do a day trip to the beach. To improvise in the meantime, we bulked up dome volume with an upturned bucket, a few rocks and lots of gravel. It might have been due to this makeshift base, or the coarseness of the sand, or the startling evaporation rate , or one of our sandcastle building techniques (as Babs and I hotly debated) but we had 3 major sandslides before completion.

Above: Babs VERY GINGERLY puts wet newspaper and sackcloth on the completed sand dome to help keep its shape while I hold my breath

The Baking Layer

This first layer of mud and clay is what absorbs heat from burning wood in the oven, then radiates it back onto food. We had too much water in the mix, leading to lots of "flab" from sinking clay (what is it they say about ovens resembling their makers?). After it solidified sufficiently, Anthony did some nip tuck, and we marked out the door and scored the roof to help it bond with the next coming layer.

Additional Heat Retention Layer

Again this layer is made of mud and clay, but with straw mixed in. You can build an entire house out of this stuff, as is the case in various pockets of the English countryside, Africa, Central America and more recently Gaza.

Getting the straw to bond evenly with the mud is quite the task (Denzer recommends you get all the kids in the family or the community involved). Two people walking on it took too long, so we eventually blasted music from the house to get things really jumpin'.

Cutting Out the Door and Hollowing Out the Oven

After running out of mud and straw for the day, we let the furry-winter-hat-looking structure dry out overnight. The next morning, Anthony and Babs debated about whether it was dry enough to cut out the door, and excavate the sand dome. Babs was convinced only after he personally conducted the very technical "squidge" test (3rd photo).

Above: For those of you trying this at home: If you're going to use an upturned bucket to pad out your base, make sure it's not too much larger than the intended height of your door!

We now have a functional oven structure! There's a 3rd layer (about 1-2 inches thick) that will eventually go on, but it's mostly decorative. In the meantime, it's time to start a little fire to dry out the oven from the inside. Babs and I can barely contain our pyro-glee as we slap together a clump of straw, twigs (2 sizes), a little log and a couple of pine cones for laughs. The team very graciously lets me light the flame. It burns beautifully. Babs and I spend the next hour just sitting on the floor staring at the flame and tossing in twigs and logs.

Our First Pizza!

Given we'll be needing to crank out pizzas for ~30 people this Saturday, the (ahem) professional thing to do was to test-drive the new oven for Monday night's dinner. Current cooking time for 1 perfect pizza currently takes 5-8 minutes. The assignment for Wednesday lunch is to experiment with timing of pizza entry and burning-log placement, to reduce cooking time and improve even-ness of heat distribution. I forsee Babs and I insisting on a lot of practice.

11 July 2009

Posts on Restaurant Kursaal in San Sebastian and our quick stop in Granada are still in the works. In the meantime I thought I'd share a half-time report on our WWOOFing stint in Orgvia, Spain.

Early high points:

Orange juice from the oranges we picked just before lunch

Watching 1,000 yr old aquaducts built by the Moors water 400-yr-old olive trees

Plowing through our hosts' bookshelves during siesta

Early low points:

Breathing so hard while working in the heat that you inhale a midge, and spend the rest of the day gagging on it, long after probably swallowing it

Weeds that beat you at tug-of-war

What on Earth is WWOOFing?

WWOOF stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. In summary you volunteer on an (often small) organic farm for an agreed number of hours a day and days a week, in exchange for food and accomodation. Along the way, you learn about different organic farming methods and sustainable living, as well as get an insider and rural view of the country you're WWOOFing in. Your WWOOF host gets some sweat and muscle (and sometimes creativity and complementary knowledge) on the cheap. No money is exchanged, so no nasty work visa paperwork is needed. You pay a nominal WWOOF network membership fee to keep the network up and running.

This sounded like a genius proposition to Babs and me. We'd get to learn a little more about the food chain, AND stretch our travel budget. We decided Spain was a good place to start, and after writing to 12 hosts in various bits of the country, providence led us to a 3-week stint with Anthony and Catherine and their 3 acres of olive and orange trees in Orgiva.

Anthony and Catherine moved to Orgiva 2.5 years ago and have since built their house and the infrastructure around their homestead bit by bit, with plenty of patience and good humour. Before moving to Spain they spent the last 2 decades teaching children with special needs. I noted this with some optimism - perhaps they'll have some patience for the occasional daftness of a lifetime city girl!

Orgiva Where?

Above: This is an optical illusion of the idyllic farming life. Swaths of land planting just 1 type of crop creates chemical imbalances in the soil over time. The wide brown paths between the olive trees ease the way for the harvesting machine, but the exposed topsoil (where the nutrients are) is vulnerable to wind and flood erosion

Orgiva is in Andalucia, about an hour south of Granada in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. It's also the administrative capital and market town of the Las Alpujarras area, the setting of Driving Over Lemons by ex-Genesis drummer Chris Stewart, the first of his autobiographical Lemons Trilogy about uprooting from the UK and building a new life among peasant Spanish farmers.

Two decades worth of Dutch, German and Brits -- blackberry-beeping businessmen and barefoot-as-a-lifestyle-choice-hippies alike -- decided the same, making the neighbourhood a strange little agricultural cosmopolis. It's not entirely hard to see why. Below is the view from our breakfast table on the front porch, and a few peeks around our hosts' garden.

Where Do We Fit In?

Specifically, in a 34-yr-old caravan in the back terrace of olive and orange trees, right next to a large patch of mint. So during the sweltering Spanish siesta, our caravan smells like Moroccan lemonade.

In addition to our hosts, we have dos chien Andalus, Zumbar (the cream-coloured one) and his mother Oliva for regular company and entertainment. Hilarious when they're horsing around, half as hilarious when Zumbar bounds off with our solar torch in his mouth, usually at dusk.

For our 3-week stint, we have 2 major projects: 1) Build an outdoor oven, and 2) Build a compost toilet. Both are partly a lead up to Catherine's birthday weekend bash on July 18.

There are also the more day-to-day tasks of upkeeping the farm: Pruning trees, ripping out monster weeds choking up irrigation channels, and replacing knackered recycled wine and beer bottles around the vegetable beds.

Our day starts at 7.30am and we try and get in the heaviest tasks done before breakfast, before the sun really goes into overdrive. The shift between breakfast and lunch goes about 5 times as slowly and we've since learnt the art of tracking the path of the sun and planning our course for hopping between tree shadows to get as much done as comfortably as we can manage. We wrap up at about 1.30pm (it's too hot to work after), have lunch, shower and pootle about for the rest of the day.